New Year Follies - Ingress Abbey, Greenhithe

This year I will carry on the approach of only posting here when there is something definitely worth posting about rather than as a discipline every other day, but although this isn't a church-related subject I nevertheless think it's a useful topic. It was only by accident that I very recently became aware of the follies of Ingress Abbey at Greenhithe in Kent, when someone on the Holy Wells LiberFaciorum page posted a picture of the Monk's Well. This was already mentioned in Ross Parish's book on Kentish wells, but I'd paid no attention to it and certainly not twigged that it formed part of a larger landscape of follies and garden design. So today I took the North Kent line out of London Bridge station and then the short walk to the park.

Ingress Abbey is an old estate going back to the 14th century, the current Tudor-Gothic house dating to 1833; between 1922 and the 19970s it was a nautical training college, but then fell into ruin. When the folly writers Headley & Meulenkamp came to the site, they found the park overgrown and the follies all but invisible, and worried about the whole place falling victim to redevelopment. This it did, but Crest Nicholson, who bought Ingress in 1998, restored the mansion and cleared out the grounds as well as building a sprawling new estate which strikes me as a sort of cut-price version of Poundbury in Dorset with its emphasis on the picturesque and individual. The current residents of the Abbey itself are British-Canadian oil and gas tycoon Sam Malin and his Cameroonian model and singer wife Irene Major: Mr Malin happens to be an Honorary Consul for Lithuania which is why the country's arms appear on the Abbey gates.

Following the Fastway road from the railway station, the first folly I came across was the Grotto, a set of shallow flint niches to the right of what was once the Abbey drive:

But this is just a very modest taster. Round the corner to the left in a close of modern dwellings, and down a flight of steps, is the very weird Cave of the Seven Heads. There are now only six of the eponymous Heads left, but very baleful they are indeed. The Cave itself has niches set into the flint interior. 

We then follow the road round to the east, and take a flight of steps, which brings us to the gate of the Abbey and the way into the Park. Here we find the glorious ruined arch known as the Grange and its associated tunnel and ancillary chambers; the Monk's Well, which does actually have a well in it; and a decorated flint seat, the Lover's Arch, looking out over the lawn of the Park. 

There are other structures around the Park which may have a more utilitarian origin - the blocked-up Georgian Tunnel, and what it variously called the Model Farm or the Limekiln:

Finally, to the east of the Park, in the middle of Palladian Circus, is a grass-covered mound topped by a flint needle capped with steel: you follow a spiral path to the top. This modern folly courtesy of the estate developers supposedly commemorates a Hermit's Cave which some say occupied the site (the mound was once taken to be Tudor, but it is not). 

Along what remains of Greenhithe High Street is what seems to be a former chapel flanked by single-bay cottages, all in Gothic style and faced in flints. It might have nothing at all to do with the Abbey estate, but it seems worth mentioning too. 

This is a very incongruous set of structures to find surrounded by modern housing on the south side of the Thames Estuary. The redevelopment of the estate makes it hard to envisage how all the follies related to one another, especially the Cave of the Seven Heads which is separated from the others by a busy road and faces west rather than inwards towards the rest of the composition: perhaps it dates to a different phase. The Heads have a distinctly Mannerist flavour to them and I wonder whether they were imported from elsewhere, rather than made especially for the purpose. The truth is that we don't know who was responsible for the follies: Historic England and most sources simply assume they date to 1833 and the rebuilding of the house, but Headley & Meulenkamp hedge their bets and I suspect they are right to do so. The structures look older to me. 

Is Ingress a Gothic Garden? I was reluctant to award this status to Deepdene, the last designed landscape which I thought might qualify for the title. I'm more inclined to look favourably on Ingress. There seems to be a genuine response here to the melancholy potential of topography which binds the follies together, rather than scattering them at random around a site. The Park originates in a quarry whose use goes back to Roman times, and the towering chalk cliffs still loom picturesquely through the trees, so whoever was responsible looked at the landscape they had inherited and saw the capacity for developing it in a Gothic direction. The Grange forms an entrance to the wild area to the rear of the house (I suspect the tidy lawn is a bit more tame than it once was), while the broad green to the front forms a contrast. 

Now, one folly I am kicking myself for missing is the Prioress's Tomb which apparently lies near the Grange. The story goes that this is the burial place of the heart of Jane Fane, last Abbess of Dartford who owned Ingress when Dartford Priory was dissolved in 1539, and that she cursed bad King Henry and all the subsequent owners of Ingress to come to ruin. This is quite something to decide to call attention to when you are building follies on your estate. One local resident even photographed a supposed White Lady weeping at the Lovers Arch seat: could she be Dame Jane herself? If Ingress was not designed as a Gothic Garden, I think it probably is now.                                                         

Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Obsession: Radio 4's 'The Witch Farm'

Let’s talk ghosts again!

My dad used to describe the frustrations of being a car mechanic. Customers would bring their cars to the garage and report ‘a funny noise’ which might be difficult to define or locate. When does this noise happen? the mechanics would ask. The customer might say that it happened under such-and-such circumstances, but not all the time. The mechanics would sigh and do their best. Sometimes they would begin work on one problem, only to discover something completely different. If this is how difficult it is to diagnose an issue concerning a lump of steel, plastic and glass with an internal combustion engine in it, an entirely material business, how hard must it be to deal with non-physical stuff you can’t test or measure, matter that’s affected by psychology, history, culture, and circumstances to unknown degrees?

As we noted in respect to Danny Robins’s previous dramatised paranormal investigation radio series, The Battersea Poltergeist, this problem is much to the fore in the one which has just finished on Radio 4, The Witch Farm. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the unfortunate Rich family experienced a bewildering variety of terrifying manifestations at an old house not far from Brecon called Heol Fanog. Over the years they engaged an equally wide range of specialists to find out why these things were happening and to stop them, beginning with the Anglican clergy at Brecon Cathedral who sprayed holy water about to no effect at all; a strange psychic with the unlikely name of Larry Harry who identified witches and other presences at the heart of the problem; a dowser who told them it was all about ley lines gone bad; a Baptist minister who spent two years, on and off, trying to drive demons out of the house; and finally ghosthunter Eddie Burks whose ministrations to the unhappy spirits he described at Heol Fanog seemed to bring positive results that sadly proved only temporary. Eventually the Riches had to leave, the family fell apart, and poor Bill Rich essentially drank himself to death.

Although I’d never heard of it before, this is far from the first time that the story of Heol Fanog has been told, but we are still no nearer a clear explanation. The various rationales, natural or paranormal, for the events at the house are not necessarily mutually exclusive; but that means that it’s hard to exclude any of them and reach a clear judgement about what went on. There’s nothing secure to go on, and in the show Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow roll their sceptic-versus-believer double act across the ambiguity without resolution. The one absolutely demonstrable, material oddity among all the Heol Fanog phenomena is the abnormally high electricity bills the Riches found themselves paying not long after moving in: that should be a plain matter to investigate, but the electricity company that operated then no longer exists, the question is never really gone into, and, while no natural explanation is offered, neither is it clear why these entities should cause so much electrical disturbance when so many others don’t.

In my very, very limited experience of this area of work the first question one asks oneself is what might be the centre of the event. Some phenomena are definitely place-based; most ghosts, whatever one thinks ghosts are, focus on a particular location and never manifest anywhere else. Many of them play out the same actions and motions whenever they appear, like recordings. Other phenomena are person-based, and what we tend to call poltergeists seem to be of this sort, capable of manifesting in different places a specific individual happens to be. So, when trying to find out what might be going on in any stated case, you would ask the witnesses whether anything of the kind had ever happened to them before, in another setting. When The Witch Farm began, this was the very first question I wanted answered; whatever may have happened to the Riches, Heol Fanog appears to be quiet now and at one point in the drama Liz Rich is told that the previous tenant never experienced anything at all (though visitors to the house claimed to have done). In fact, Heol Fanog is quiet to the point that when Danny Robins goes to visit the location with a dowser he rather implies that they have to creep around the perimeter of the property and avoid annoying the current residents: he doesn’t actually state ‘we contacted them and they told us to get knotted’, but let’s say they don’t seem to have anything to add to the investigation, as they might if they were being plagued by the paranormal themselves.

Despite Heol Fanog’s apparently complex and disagreeable history, that led me to think right from the start that one of the Rich family was crucial to the whole thing and, by the end of the series, it seems that Bill Rich’s one-time involvement with the occult – he began an initiation into witchcraft with Alex and Maxine Sanders, but backed out before it was complete – was at the centre of the events, whether we understand its effects as supernatural or psychological. But in fact I’m coming to wonder whether there’s a third category of phenomena engendered by a person susceptible to disturbance arriving in potentially disturbed surroundings, and that may be what we have in The Witch Farm.

David Holmwood, the local Baptist minister who the Riches are put onto as a potential solution for their problems, interests me. Mr Holmwood worked in industry and his wife Patricia was a nurse before he concluded that he was being called to the ministry in 1971. He served as a student pastor at Stockwood Free Church in Bristol and then went to Fillebrook Baptist Church in east London before they both worked in Brazil. Mr Holmwood’s next posting I can find was in Romsey in 1988, after which he must have gone to Wales. Then he was at Stoke Row in Buckinghamshire, and his last appointment was with the chaplaincy team at Heathrow Airport in the early 2000s – in fact he was there to witness the effects of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. This all seems unspectacular enough if a bit more varied than the average nonconformist minister's career, but The Witch Farm interviews his successor at Jerusalem Baptist in Pentrebach who states that Mr Holmwood had an extensive ministry of exorcism and dealing with the paranormal, at least while he was there.

Of course I had my head in my hands when the show described him as ‘a local vicar’ (he wasn’t), but Revd Holmwood doesn’t do anything an Anglican clergyperson might not, apart from working as a freelancer: Anglicans operate in teams, bringing doctors and psychologists into play as well as spiritual weaponry, but Mr Holmwood doesn’t have anyone else on board except for an American ex-Satanist called Anita. He drives them all to Heol Fanog and during the journey an owl chucks itself against the windscreen of the car in broad daylight, which is very Hammer House of Horror. Curiously he appears – from the drama, anyway – to identify Bill Rich as the focus of the problem quite quickly, but apparently never draws from him the actual reason why this might be so, instead getting him to burn his spooky paintings as he decides they are the way the Devil ‘gets in’. Even if Mr Holmwood’s techniques are not that different from his Anglican counterparts’, his obsessive persistence seems unusual. Not only does he take months readying himself for his oncoming battle with Satan, if we believe the narrative we’re presented with, he spends about two years hanging around at Heol Fanog, intermittently staying there, praying, reading Scripture, and scaring the Riches even more than they are already, until eventually they’ve had enough of him. Nothing that he does has any effect on what they’re experiencing. Coming from a Christian perspective, these techniques are supposed to be powerful and effective, based as they are in the power of God; if they haven’t achieved anything after repeated application, you ought to question whether your entire analysis of the problem is awry.

However we interpret the story of the Rich family, it strikes me that there’s another tale to be told here, that of a Christian minister sucked in by their own interpretation of a set of events which in fact seem to centre on a disturbed, lonely, and guilt-ridden individual. In that way, Revd David Holmwood – God rest his soul – should probably have had reason to be grateful that he was eventually detached from the obsessive power of Heol Fanog. 

Things That Go Bump

Like many other things, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition. When Radio 4's podcast The Battersea Poltergeist came out at the start of the year I was wary of its promised mixture of 'drama and documentary', but having dipped into presenter Danny Robins's other offering, Uncanny, I gave it a go and somewhat against my better judgement was drawn into the narrative. The hook is the prospect of finding something that will prove conclusively what's going on in this 'paranormal cold case' from 1956, in which a working-class family in southwest London is tormented by a manifestation which - it was eventually claimed - was the Dauphin Louis Charles, the lost heir to the French crown. It will not spoil the fun too much to reveal that nothing is mentioned in the podcast which proves anyone's point of view. It's vanishingly unlikely that Louis Charles was smuggled into England, rather than dying, as history has recorded, sick, maltreated and neglected, in the Tower of the Paris Temple in 1795, so whatever the poltergeist the family called 'Donald' was, he wasn't that. Yet while there are possible normal explanations for much of what happened in no.63 Wycliffe Road, it's hard to account for the rappings, bangings, and other weirdness that followed Shirley Hitchings, the 15-year-old at the centre of the phenomena, to distant places, including the studios of the BBC where she was interviewed by Cliff Michelmore for the Highlight programme, an event that clearly unsettled Michelmore enough for him to refer to it years later. Mr Robins has two resident consultants to epitomise the different approaches listeners might take to the story - writer on the paranormal Evelyn Hollow, who is a bit of a Goth, and 'arch-sceptic' academic psychologist Ciaran O'Keeffe, who isn't. They bat about the possibilities between them and neither inflicts a killer blow, as it were.  With skilful artifice, the show draws every atom of energy from this indeterminacy: but in truth, although Mr Robins often mentions using a mysterious cardboard box of papers left by the paranormal investigator Harold Chibbett, who worked on the case at the time, and having interviewed Shirley Hitchings, James Clark, who wrote the whole thing up in The Poltergeist Prince of London in 2013, did both too. The podcast adds a few new nuggets of information: for instance, a graphologist decides that the  mysterious letters from Donald are almost certainly in the same hand as Shirley's. But ultimately the only way a listener will be able to decide is to have decided already, long before they hear the story. 

What do I think about it? In the end I wouldn't see much to dissent from in sceptic Deborah Hyde's assessment that Donald was 'a story with many authors, created communally, both consciously and unconsciously, according to a script that's readily available to everyone in that culture'. There's a lot in the Battersea Poltergeist narrative that doesn't add up, but at this distance in time it's almost impossible to disentangle what might have happened regarding any reported phenomenon in the case. As the priest who took our classes on this stuff at theological college said, 'There's about two hundred things a thing can be'.

My experience is that people often have a somewhat unhealthy interest in this kind of weirdness and so I am wary of feeding the fire: the Church as a whole has also been very, very reticent about this in the past after some loose practice resulted in terrible cases of abuse or malpractice in the name of 'the ministry of deliverance' (I wrote about a film based on one fairly recent incident in Romania). But the situation when I arrived in the Guildford diocese where people were reluctant even to mention who the Advisor on Deliverance was does seem a bit extreme, and in fact there's now a relevant page on the diocesan website. In fact such stuff comes my way pretty infrequently, amounting to only half a dozen cases in sixteen years, and most of them so vague and uncertain that it wasn't clear any lay beyond the normal bounds of psychology. As a priest I am of course committed to the idea that there is a non-material aspect to human life, but also to a scepticism about any particular incident that presents itself, and I'm always grateful that I seem to be completely insensitive to 'atmospheres' and the like. I don't know anyone even remotely inclined to go in all-guns-blazing with holy water, lighted candles and the Major Exorcism of Persons and Places at the first hint of paranormal events. The last such incident I dealt with was someone who had become convinced there was a 'presence' in their home and who'd been unsettled by a medium friend claiming they could detect the spirit of a young woman who'd lived in a large house on the site of the block of flats that was there currently, who had died after a pregnancy and been illicitly buried in the garden. After some discussion we agreed that in fact nothing needed to be done apart from praying for this soul, if soul it was, to be assured of God's mercy and justice. We did so, and the manifestation, such as it was, stopped. Make of that what you will. 

Make what you will, too, of the only time anything weird has ever come my way personally. I went to visit a mother and adult daughter who lived on a new estate built on an old site. The daughter had done some low-level mediumship in the past and was now, she said, afflicted by unwelcome presences that seemed to be linked to the history of the place: she (and others) heard voices, and she experienced a sense of oppression. I arrived at the house, and spoke to the mother in the kitchen, with my bag (containing all my kit - Bible, stole, water and anointing oil, just in case) on the table beside me. I could see the daughter appear on the stairs out of the corner of my eye but was still in mid-sentence so I didn’t turn to her for a few seconds. When we moved to go to the living room, I checked my bag and found a lipstick and hair grip in it. As I got them out, the daughter said they were hers. Both she and her mother seemed bewildered at how they got there. We left them on the table and said no more about it. After I left the house, I sat in the car for a few moments and said, ‘If there are any of you here, I want to make it absolutely clear that you must stay here where you belong. You’re not coming back with me!' On getting home I thought I’d go to church to say Evening Prayer and went through my bag to get my stole and the oil to take back. Right at the bottom, under my Bible, notebook and other things, I found a bulky car key and battery fob with two keyrings. This turned out to be the daughter's too. It's possible that she could have placed the objects in my bag in those few seconds when she wasn’t completely in my field of vision, though she would need a Magic Circle-level of expertise to do it without me seeing her move, or hearing the keys rattle. She certainly couldn’t have done so without her mother seeing so if there was deception it was done by both of them. Despite my prayers and those of others - it turned out the couple had been talking to various other people as well as me - the manifestations didn't seem to stop completely. I still have no idea what any of that was really about.

Don't, as the wonderful theme song to Uncanny by Lanterns on the Lake insists, have nightmares!

Best Dressed Ghost

All sorts of things end up in museum collections, but until very recently I had no idea that Bridport Museum contained a haunted dress. On her lovely blog DownbytheseaDorset Sarah mentioned it in her account of the recent show at the Museum, 'A Change of Clothes' in which the dress in question came out of storage. The story goes that it was pushed through the bars in front of the main door of the museum one night some years ago with no explanation, and no provenance. It's a nice piece - claimed in some places to be 17th-century, though it's not that - and perhaps it's speculating why such a fine item should have been anonymously dumped on a museum doorstep under cover of darkness which has led to the conviction that there is something wrong with it. 'A young woman is frequently seen guarding' the garment, and supposedly a former curator tried to have it exorcised. 

It reminded me that a former curator of the same establishment once told me that they'd been told a doll in the collection was also possessed of a presence. They tried to alert the Anglican authorities who 'treated me as though I needed psychiatric help' and in the end decided the safest thing to do with the object was burn it. I wonder how that fits under the Museums Association's model disposals policy. Did this same person also spread the tale about the haunted dress? For my part, speaking professionally, I think if an object does shelter a malign presence in it you may as well leave it there. At least you know where it is. 

Photo: The Bridport News

Fra' Ghoulies an' Ghosties an' Lang-Leggedy Beasties

'I've always defended Harry Potter', Marion the curate told me this morning, 'but now I'm not sure ...' She was referring to a BBC documentary she'd seen last night about the background to the books, which included an interview with author JK Rowling at the new exhibition at the British Library, 'The History of Magic'. The show includes items such as Ms Rowling's notebooks as well as magical paraphernalia from across the centuries, among them some of the ritualia I found so queasy when we saw them at the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle, all hanging off the hook of the Potter series (and the timing of Halloween). Ms R wasn't alone on screen: alongside her were members of a family who claimed they were 'fourteenth-generation wand-makers'. This would take their profession back into the mid-17th century, and that doesn't seem that likely to me. Wands seem to come into vogue with the 19th-century magical societies, and you don't see illustrations or read descriptions of magical practitioners from earlier times, cunning men and village wart-curers, using wands (unless there's some confusion with the rods employed by dowsers). Rowling apparently looked increasingly uncomfortable, and felt compelled to contribute, 'Remember that I made all this stuff up. It isn't real.'

Well she might wince. The British Library puffs the show with the lines, 'Have you ever wanted to delve into divination or ponder the peculiarities of potions? Now you can ...' The film the Library has released to accompany the display promises that 'the gargantuan Ripley Scroll' will show visitors 'how to make a Philosopher's Stone', which of course it won't, because there is no such thing, and still less is what the Scroll purports to tell you how to make anything like the Philosopher's Stone of the first Potter novel. Oh, what a killjoy I am sounding. Of course this is all just marketing and will be a long way removed from the inevitable staidness of the show itself, but what's being marketed is unreality.

Conservative Christians make this whole argument ridiculous by implying that every child who picks up a Potter novel or goes out with a group of friends dressed as Spiderman, assorted pirates or ghosts, is going to be invaded by the forces of the Enemy, and in doing so they blind us to the fact that they have half a point, which I think I am only beginning to appreciate. If there is a force of evil active in the world, it can only work through us. Our fears, desires, miseries and delusions are its raw material and it cannot manufacture them on its own: it needs us to offer them up. The near side of the fantasy universe of Harry Potter is fun and at its deepest a narrative of courage and loss; on its far side, though, is unreality and unreason, a universe which functions according to occult rules - as good as none, in other words - a realm of madness. Fourteen generations of wand-makers. I heard complaints on the radio recently about the cruelty of some commercially-available Halloween costumes, and cruelty and madness have a relationship, too. This all takes place within a consumerist economy which is by nature amoral and tends to escalate whatever tendencies are at work in it.  

The BBC website yesterday reminded me of Ghostwatch, the notorious spoof documentary about an investigation of a haunting in a suburban house. I remember seeing that on Halloween in 1992 and, before an allusion to something that I knew was untrue alerted me to the fact that the programme wasn't real, I was as unsettled and disturbed as anyone by what I was apparently seeing and hearing. One young man, of course, was so unsettled that five days after the show was broadcast he killed himself, unable to escape the constant thoughts of ghosts. He had fallen into a vortex of fear from which reason could not rescue him. This, and not any supernatural incursion, is what it means to come into the grip of the Devil. 

Provided the pumpkin lanterns and the cut-out bats and ghosts hanging in festoons are a tiny dose of fear that inoculates us against the disease, all well and good. But it could be that sometimes they light the way to a country where there are no landmarks, where we do not know where we are, where there is nothing but unreality and reasonless waste, and we are right to dread going along that path.

Goth Walk XXV: The Cock Lane Ghost

Last Saturday, to mark the conclusion of my holiday, I took the LGMG on a history walk looking at the story of that 18th-century fraudulent haunting, the Cock Lane Ghost, for which I donned my Georgian clergyman's gear (although the gown isn't exactly authentic, being a rather basic modern academic gown rather than ankle-length and gathered at the cuffs as a proper 18th-century one would have been). The sun shone as we made our way from the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell and meandered through Smithfield, Newgate and the City, concluding down by Southwark Bridge as we recalled other made-up spectres and wondered whether poor Scratching Fanny had indeed died the natural death she was supposed to have done. Dr Johnson, Hogarth and Horace Walpole all cropped up in the story, and when we visited Bartletts Court where Fanny and William Kent had lodged and I described the seances where the supposed ghost was contacted by what is now the standard method of communicating with spirits by raps and knocks, even though nothing survives there from 1762, a metal pillar presented itself as an ideal source for sound effects - 'Knock once for yes, twice for no!'

Photograph by Mr Christian Zaire.

Grim Fairy Tales

I saw that picture years ago in an encyclopedia of mythology and was always captivated by the figure at the right in the background, the Earth Spider. He's about as nasty as an eight-foot-high Japanese spider demon can be. There he is, weaving his web of nightmares over the epic hero Kuniyoshi.

Last Thursday I went to the Ashmolean for an exhibition of 19th-century Japanese prints illustrating stories of ghosts and demons, and this picture was one of them. I also rather liked the haunted hero who looks out from his tea room to see a landscape transformed into skulls - a skull hill, trees bedecked with skulls, skulls on the grass, even th lanterns. Yes, that's what being nuts is like. The world of Japanese folklore with all its categories of very unpleasant supernatural being is beguiling. One trick I thought the display missed was any relationship to modern manifestations of Eastern ghosts and ghouls - the horrid Sadako prime among them, of course.